A Quiet Refusal to Compromise

Over the past decade, with amazement and dismay, I have watched former friends and acquaintances make radical turns toward a conservatism that I no longer recognize. This story is well known by now: beginning in 2015, conservatives began to divide into pro- and never-Trump factions. Some visited or moved to Hungary. National conservatism and integralism and “Common Good Conservatism” emerged as new options for disaffected traditionalists, and of course, liberalism “failed.”

All of this is chronicled in Laura Field’s new book, Furious Minds (reviewed earlier for Law & Liberty by John Grove). The volume is basically a book of highbrow gossip, and it has its faults. But it also provides a fairly accurate account of the past ten years. Field completed her PhD in (Straussian) political philosophy at the University of Texas in 2011. During her student years and afterward, she existed on the margins of intellectual conservatism. She watched many of the movement’s major players as they engaged in activism, wrote provocative essays, and instigated revolution on the Right. [...]

The problem in 2026 is that many of the most prominent intellectual conservatives have sold their birthrights for the fleeting fame promised by social media, podcasts, and coverage in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and other prestige outlets. They appear more interested in making names for themselves or “blowing up the system” than in doing the quiet, unobserved, humble work of renewing the institutions that are so vital to civil society. They are, at root, interested in winning the culture wars, and winning requires fighting. It’s what a friend has called “punch-in-the-face conservatism.” In borrowing methods from the cultural Left, many of them have become right-wing Gramscians. These men (and they are nearly all men) sense that America has arrived at an eschatological moment, and they definitely want everyone else to know it too.

I also think they find it exciting and invigorating. At last we have come to a crisis point that demands strategy and action! Enough with all the subsidiarity, little platoons, and institutional reform. Conservatives should be bold enough to grasp the levers of power and use them against the Left, just as the Left has used them against us. As one Claremont Institute commentator has written, breathlessly, “Practically speaking, there is almost nothing left to conserve. What is actually required now is a recovery, or even a refounding of America.” Helen Andrews has imagined a parallel crisis in the relations between the sexes. Her “great feminization” thesis lays the blame for “wokeness” on all those overachieving and schoolmarmish women who now dominate the white-collar professions. In her words, they are a “potential threat to civilization.” And on and on. It’s easy to adduce multiple examples of this overheated rhetoric.

To be fair, there are (of course) elements of truth in many of the scathing critiques leveled by the New Right. Andrews is correct that, in the aggregate, there are differences between men’s and women’s leadership styles. Christopher Rufo and others aren’t wrong that advocates of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” greatly overplayed their hands. And much of the extreme reaction on the Right is undoubtedly a response to the provocations of the Left, whose activists haven’t exactly been models of self-restraint over the past few decades.

Unlike those on the New Right, though, I’m not sure that we’re at an eschatological moment in Western culture. We might be. But whether or not we’ve arrived at a civilizational crisis, there are alternative ways of responding to this moment, ways far more authentically conservative than what is now playing out in so many contemporary institutions.

In thinking about what conservatism means, and about how to respond to our cultural moment, two courses of action come to mind. The first is to recalibrate our view of the world; the second, to engage in practices that don’t incite battles but preserve and rejuvenate culture. Work like this is not likely to be praised or even recognized, and it asks for quiet self-assurance, not loud declarations on social media. Cultivating a positive and hopeful vision in the midst of disorder simply is the primary obligation of conservatives, especially if we’re Christians, whose hopes lie not in the rise or fall of any particular worldly power.

Why is it so difficult, and so unpopular, to embrace this hopeful, alternative vision, and why are conflict and battle so enduringly attractive? William Hazlitt offers an answer in his shrewd essay from 1826 entitled “On the Pleasure of Hating.” There is a “secret affinity, a hankering after, evil in the human mind,” he writes, which “takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction.” Life would “turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all around it as dark as possible.”

Most of us will recognize this universal human tendency to take perverse pleasure in hating, and in dwelling on ugly and disordered things. The desire to see awfulness helps to explain the market for polemics and declension narratives rather than subtle and qualified arguments. Who has not felt, in a moment of crisis, a sudden sharpening of the will, a vision of exactly the path forward?

The pleasure of critique also provides a sense of superiority, both intellectually—because we have seen things as they truly are—and morally. Deny it though we do, it is pleasant to think oneself smarter than others and to imagine that we, not they, stand on a solid foundation of truth. Similarly, in the moral sphere, if we are part of an unappreciated or persecuted minority, there is solace in knowing that our way of life is simply better than that of our opponents, even if the world at large does not agree.

And then there is the boredom factor. Temperance, civility, politeness, and all the other virtues that accompany political moderation can seem boring and mundane. Even if we mostly depend on norms of civility and respect in daily life, it is exciting to have a firebrand in the room—someone who will stir things up and throw rhetorical bombs. This is as true in a seminar room as in a board meeting. We admire and emulate the provocateur, the celebrity, and the radical, and are drawn to those with outrageous and “cutting-edge” views.

Yet these moral and intellectual eccentrics depend for their existence on an unseen foundation of equanimity, careful argument, civility, and self-control. They themselves may neglect or disparage this foundation, but it is nevertheless vital that somebody shore it up. Traditionally, this has been a job for conservatives.

So should conservatives be warriors or maintainers? Part of the answer will undoubtedly depend on temperament. Everyone knows people who are thoroughly pacific and disengaged or, on the other hand, full of spirit and always ready to argue. The latter disposition is what one sees far more often in the new conservatives I have been identifying, those who clamor to fight and win the culture wars with snark, meanness, and irony.

The tenor of the alternative—of a more gracious conservatism—is not adversarial but generative. It looks toward the present and the future, though not in the way that progressivism does, with its hopes of constant political improvement. Instead, this conservatism focuses on the things that are being conserved by living them fully, and by engaging in practices delivered from the past. It asks us to act within our own small spheres of influence, doing good where it is real, tangible, and visible, at levels much less national and much less public. While most of us aren’t prodigies, we all possess talents, aptitudes, and loves, which we would do well to use and develop. And this will make some difference, or all the difference, to those who live around us.

by Elizabeth Corey, Law & Liberty |  Read more:

Image: Agostino Masucci; Artcurial Worldwide/Wikimedia Commons
[ed. This is a conservative perspective I can get behind, but one that glosses over the 'tactics' the fighting contingent employ. Tactics that are frequently dishonest, threatening, sleazy and/or outright illegal. No valor in that, whatever rationalizations conservatives use for the ends justifying the means. By the way, the Hazlitt link (Pleasure of Hating) is well worth a read.]

AI Won’t Stave Off the Debt Disaster

For years, I kept a favorite cartoon in my desk and pulled it out to open the annual business-plan meeting at the unit I led. It showed a frazzled executive standing in front of a screen displaying his multiyear sales projections. The line ran straight horizontally, close and parallel to the x-axis, almost to the right edge, where it leaped steeply upward, next to a label that said, “Miracle happens here!”

No impulse is more human than wishfulness, the tendency to grasp at any straw that enables us to avert our eyes from difficult realities and put off facing them. Members of America’s national political class personify this failing, in their continuing practice of fiscal denialism. Even as the inexorable arithmetic piles up, those responsible for the nation’s economic future and national security fasten on imaginary miracles to justify a gross default of their duty of stewardship.

A decade ago, as the national debt surged toward the once unthinkable level of $20 trillion (now nearing $40 trillion), denialists took brief refuge in an alchemist fantasy that called itself Modern Monetary Theory. The notion that a nation could borrow without limit, forever, in its own fiat currency was quickly demolished by full-spectrum critiques, in venues ranging from the Cato Institute to the Review of Keynesian Economics. The experts weren’t really necessary; you could have just consulted the Journal of Common Sense, or maybe your grandparents.

MMT has mercifully disappeared from serious discussion, but the wishful impulse has not. Its latest comfort station is the claim that the productivity boost that artificial intelligence will bring to the economy will bail us out of our sinking boatload of debt. Stop worrying; “Miracle happens here!”

In our post-truth world, facts aren’t as stubborn as they used to be, but the most obstinate of all are the mathematical ones. They tell us not to rely on even the powerfully positive impact of these new technologies to spare us the radical adjustments that a generation of procrastination has now made inevitable.

That isn’t to say that no help is on the way. The evidence is persuasive that AI and related advances are already boosting the economy in the most important way possible, by raising productivity. That’s the biggest reason that GDP is surprising on the upside while job growth remains tepid. Moreover, forecasts that this favorable windage will accelerate seem highly credible.

What’s not credible is the idea that even an AI-led productivity surge can suffice to offset our decades of dereliction. The Congressional Budget Office, the Federal Reserve, and other forecasters peg average future economic growth at a little under 2 percent. Assume a 70 percent boost from the AI revolution, to 3 percent or so, and it becomes possible to imagine our current debt level stabilizing, not improving but merely getting no worse.

But even this daydream requires far too many improbable breaks. Simulations conclude that the chances of growth of even 2.6 percent are less than 1 in 20. That’s without factoring in the possibility of a military crisis, a recession, another pandemic, or any other macroeconomic setback. AI revenue increases could be partially offset by new spending requirements, for energy infrastructure, for example.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model credits AI with a healthy 1.5 percent productivity and GDP increase over the next decade. That would result in deficit reduction of some $400 billion over those 10 years. Not chump change, but only a fraction of what would be required, given the tsunami of entitlement spending, driving trillions of added debt, making landfall over that period.

AI enthusiasts assure us that the beneficial impact will be even bigger. Let’s hope they’re right, although that would mean a bigger productivity surge than those brought by electricity or the Internet. Even if it happens, it cannot conceivably get here before the trust fund insolvencies start in the early 2030s. Kent Smetters, a Penn Wharton Budget Model scholar, states flatly that AI, however positive, isn’t “a magic bullet” and that the call is “not even close.”

Let’s stipulate that AI will be the transformative wonder that its inventors foresee; that the CBO and other forecasters have often tended to underestimate US economic growth, especially in environments of lightened regulation and taxation; and that the United States somehow sails through an unprecedented streak without a single costly exogenous blow.

It still ain’t enough.

by Mitch Daniels, Law and Liberty/WaPo |  Read more:

Image: chekart/Shutterstock
[ed. Yet we keep digging deeper. Where does another $500 billion/yr for defense spending come from? Or, say, $700 million to prop up coal billionaires (below)? Thin air.]

‘Clean, Beautiful’ Coal Industry Gets $700m Bailout

Trump uses wartime powers to dole out $700m to ‘clean, beautiful’ coal (The Guardian)

Donald Trump is using wartime presidential authority to hand $700m to coal-fired power plants in the US, the latest move by the president to bolster what he called “clean, beautiful coal”, despite it being the dirtiest of fossil fuels.

“Today, we’re taking historic action to bring down the price of energy and the cost of living for all Americans with the power of clean, beautiful coal,” he said at a press conference on Thursday. [...]

In the past year, the Trump administration has doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to the coal industry, signed orders forcing ratepayers to pay extra for ageing plants to stay open, and dismantled environmental rules that limit toxins from coal leaching into Americans’ shared air and water.

The administration’s attempts to provide a cuddly rebranding to coal have even extended to creating a new mascot with giant eyes, called Coalie, and gushing social media posts that include an image of a lump of coal wearing sunglasses as if it were on the TV show Love Island.

“You’re not allowed to say ‘coal’ within the Trump administration unless it’s preceded by the words ‘clean, beautiful’,” Trump said on Thursday. “Complicates our life, but it’s good.” [...]

Trump’s attempts to revive the coal industry, while at the same time seeking to stymie the rapid growth of clean energy such as solar and wind, have so far floundered. The number of people working in coal has declined by more than 90% in the past century, with more people now working in Waffle Houses across the US than in coal.

US coal production is currently less than half of what it was in 2008, with coal recently declining as both a fuel for electricity and as an input for manufacturing materials such as iron and steel. Cheap, abundant gas has helped displace coal from power grids with even cheaper renewable energy also now taking off in the US despite the administration’s efforts to kill it off.

“What’s next, a taxpayer bailout to build new phone booths?” said Kit Kennedy, a senior climate campaigner at the Natural Resources Defense Council, of the new round of support for coal. “This is going to mean higher bills and dirtier air. What a waste.”

by Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
[ed. One picture = thousand words. The stupidity never ends. In other news of the stupid, henchman Hegseth gets bad reviews for his speech commemorating D-Day:]

***

"Speaking in north-west France on Saturday to mark the 82nd anniversary of the D-day landings, Hegseth seized on the moment marking the wartime liberation of Europe to reiterate the US administration’s longstanding attack on European immigration policies.

“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies,” Hegseth told those gathered at the American military cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer.

“Beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not,” he said."

The remarks were swiftly condemned on social media. The English historian, author and television presenter Simon Schama described them as a “special kind of loathsomeness: a blend of historical deafness, grotesque stupidity and comically ludicrous self-importance”.

Schama added: “As if the little people’s rage against immigration somehow is superior to the war against the 3rd Reich and entitles this comic book nobody to lecture the actual heroes.”

A Conservative Not Afraid to Be a ‘Beautiful Loser’

What does it mean to be conservative in the Trump era? How is that changing? Has the term — and the philosophy behind it — lost all meaning?

Elizabeth Corey, a political scientist at Baylor, is a conservative — though what she sees being called “conservatism” today has left her dismayed.

She explained what she thinks about conservatism’s present, and potential future, in a written conversation with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion. It has been edited for length and clarity.

John Guida: What is the state of conservatism today, and how confusing has it been to call yourself one in the Trump era?

Elizabeth Corey: The state of conservatism is quite varied, as anyone who follows politics knows. There are post-liberals, common-good conservatives, national conservatives and so on. One thing I see in all these camps is a certain adversarial posture toward American culture — or toward certain aspects of that culture that they dislike. I sympathize with some of that.

But my own understanding of conservatism is different — it’s grounded in culture and tradition, and in some sense, religion. It’s the idea that we should “conserve” the many goods that we have received from the past: philosophy, art, poetry, music, family life, etc. We can’t have any of these things without a stable political order. But political action is not at the very heart of things. [...]

Guida: Conservatives traditionally looked on government action skeptically. There’s the quote from Ronald Reagan: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ” The current administration has shifted that posture. Is that one area of conservatism you no longer recognize?

Corey: It is. And it worries me, because if anything we’ve seen conservatives seize state power with a force that I wouldn’t have imagined possible before Trump. This troubles me not just because it hasn’t been a traditional conservative view, but because the degree of moral righteousness is often unquestioned.

Guida: You explored this adversarial political posture through an 1826 essay by William Hazlitt, “On the Pleasure of Hating,” in which he describes hating as “a never-failing source of satisfaction.” The pleasure of hating, he writes, transforms religion, patriotism and virtue into pretexts for destruction. You sympathized, to an extent, with the energizing aspects of tribalism.

Corey: Hazlitt was on to something in that essay — many of us don’t want to admit it, but we like to see bad and awful things because, frankly, they make us feel better about ourselves. To hate something gives us clarity about what we don’t hate, but also because hating the right things, with the right people, gives us a sense of camaraderie and of being together with a tribe of like-minded others.

Perhaps the most damning thing Hazlitt says in that essay is that we hate because “we cannot bear a state of indifference and ennui: the mind seems to abhor a vacuum.” A lot of us are bored and distracted right now, and politics as war is entertaining.

Guida: Do you think a minority of super-engaged Americans are driving this cycle?

Corey: This is a tremendous problem at present. Many people who don’t have radical and activist views have checked out of politics because they think they are the weird ones. I don’t live online as much as some people do, so I’m often talking to people who say that they are politically homeless — that they would gladly vote for any reasonable person of any party, but they don’t see such people in politics. So they check out altogether.

Part of the reason I wrote the recent pieces was simply to say that there is probably a quiet majority out there of more-or-less sensible people. Why should the loudest voices be the only ones we hear?

Guida: You contrast the space that adversarial politics takes place in with a more “generative” space. You wrote, “Our modern frenzy and constant, anxious busyness push us away from the very sources of cultural conservatism that I and so many others want to rejuvenate.” How do you balance the demands of citizenship — which includes, at least to some extent, politics — with that generative attitude?

Corey: One thing I’d say here is that the obligations of citizenship are very important, and I would like to shore up our notion of what it means to be a citizen. That’s what all the schools of civic leadership around the country are doing. But I would also say that citizenship is, for most of us, a local activity, which is mostly lost in the contemporary debate. Writing essays and being on social media is a kind of political activity, undoubtedly, but I’m not sure it’s the most important part of citizenship.

Far more important are the things we do that have real impacts on real people, like serving on juries and school boards and taking part in the communities where we actually live. That kind of activity is vital for human flourishing, and it requires us to interact with people who are not like us. We can’t be tribal on a jury.

Guida: You suggest that those who are “unrelentingly angry and critical” nevertheless draw from “an unseen foundation of equanimity, careful argument, civility and self-control” — a foundation, as you put it, traditionally maintained by conservatives. What is that foundation? What is in it? Books, music?

Corey: As a college professor, I’m always tempted to say it has something to do with education. When you read and converse and learn how to think philosophically, or “disinterestedly,” you are forced to see yourself in different ways — not as the center of the world, but almost as a character in a play.

That sounds a little bit strange, I realize; but when you read literature or philosophy you gain a certain distance that allows you not only to consider the complexities of the characters in the books, but yourself as well. You may be inclined to be a bit more humble, a bit more charitable, about what you know, and about your judgments of other people. This leads, often, to a kind of “moral calm” that can lead to equanimity and self-control.

It’s not just books and learning: We also learn these things in families — perhaps nowhere better do we come to terms with our emotions (their good and bad outcomes). Ideally, we learn how to be human — how to compromise and consider others’ feelings — through family. It’s a deeply Christian vision of what social life could be. Humility and charity aren’t easy virtues, after all — especially when you’re attacked.

Guida: Another quality that conservatives have traditionally stressed is character, including or even in particular in political leaders. Has the shift away from character as a concern — among politicians like President Trump or even, in Texas, Ken Paxton, who just won the Republican Senate runoff — surprised you?

Corey: This is where I see the arguments about power coming to the fore. Yes, some people say, character matters, but this is our one chance to do something big! Even if we’re a little squeamish about someone’s character, that matters less than what that person can do to advance our cause. And again, it’s about power, winning and losing: If winning is what matters, and it seems in many places to be the most important thing, then the way we win is less important. Warriors, I think, would say that we can’t be afraid to dirty our hands in the process. While I recognize that arguments about moral purity can be taken too far, I still think character matters.

Also on this question: I can’t tell you how many people in my circles have commented on the recent Ross Douthat-Ben Sasse interview. That great “sensible middle” that I’ve been talking about is simply dying to see people like Sasse in positions of authority; but there are very few of him in public life.

Guida: You mentioned the phrase, “Politics is downstream from culture.” How do you think about the direction of travel, so to speak, in that phrase. President Trump has now been elected twice to the presidency. There is clearly a part of the electorate that clamors for “warriors.” Is that coming from a new type of culture, one that is the antithesis of the type of culture that you describe?

Corey: I don’t have a way of knowing what a vast majority of Americans think — and yet I do have my own experience to go by. Just last week I visited several national parks in Utah, and had the opportunity to listen in on people’s conversations — on the shuttles, in the hotel breakfasts and elsewhere. I was struck by the genuine goodness of so many of these people. What did they want? They wanted their families to flourish, they wanted to be proud of their country (as they were, in Zion National Park) and they talked about neighbors, pets and sometimes politics. I guess what I took from this is that most people really aren’t invested in the kind of politics we often see in the media. That’s what makes me think that there is a quiet majority of people who, like me, want to move away from political warfare.

Because here’s the problem with warfare among citizens: What is the end game? What do we do with the opponents whom we’ve supposedly vanquished? They’re all still here, and we must live with them. It’s a little like a marital fight: You don’t think about “defeating” your “enemy”; you must somehow still live together in peace after the fight is over.

Guida: So is it fair to say that your hope is that somehow — through better leaders, institutions, some persistent mechanism — the quiet majority begins to reshape our politics and national future?

Corey: I do hope so. Perhaps that’s idealistic. It’s hard to say anything these days without worrying that you’ll be pilloried for it. But we really can’t let the loud and bellicose voices drown us out.

by Elizabeth Corey and John Guida, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Daniel Ribar for The New York Times

In Support of Mandatory Nucleic Acid Synthesis Screening and Recordkeeping

As life sciences researchers, builders of AI and biotechnology, and experts with a wide range of views on how to approach AI policy, we call on legislators to make screening of orders for synthetic nucleic acids — and the equipment needed to make them — mandatory.

The ability to order synthetic DNA online has accelerated vaccine development, powered basic research, and made it possible for small teams to access capabilities that used to be confined to major institutions. Since the publication of protocols to reconstruct viruses from strands of DNA more than two decades ago, it has also been recognized as a point in the biotechnology supply chain where a bad actor could cause outsized harm. Recognizing the vulnerability, synthesis companies formed the International Gene Synthesis Consortium in 2009 to develop and implement voluntary safeguards against misuse.

While the issue is not new, the pace of progress in artificial intelligence is. AI systems now outperform PhD-level virologists on questions about highly technical laboratory procedures in their own domains of expertise. The evidence about what this means for present-day biosecurity threats is genuinely mixed, but the trend is hard to dispute. AI systems are improving rapidly, and alongside incredible benefits to science and medicine, there is a real possibility that the knowledge barriers which have historically prevented bad actors from obtaining biological weapons will meaningfully erode.

Support for screening does not depend on any particular view of AI; the biosecurity case has been recognized by scientists and governments for decades. Screening is also one of the best understood and least disruptive biosecurity measures available. It asks providers of synthesized DNA and manufacturers of synthesis machines to check synthesis requests for sequences of concern and to verify customer legitimacy before shipping orders. Providers should also record synthesis orders and sequence data to support legitimate biosecurity investigations, so that any threat that might evade initial screening can be traced back to its source — including when individual sequences would not raise concern in isolation. Awareness of traceability itself deters misuse.

Many of the largest and most responsible providers in the industry already screen and record orders voluntarily because it is well understood that they have an important role to play in maintaining public trust in and mitigating potential misuse of this important technology.

For these reasons, the undersigned support mandatory nucleic acid synthesis screening, including recordkeeping, in the United States.

Given the pace at which the underlying technology is changing, we believe the need is urgent. Congress should act this session, and we applaud the legislative efforts currently underway. To ensure a consistent national standard rather than a patchwork of conflicting laws, states should also consider implementing requirements based on existing federal and industry guidelines.

This is a rare moment of agreement across stakeholders that are often at odds. We hope policymakers will meet it with decisive action.

Sincerely,
Signatories: — *Everybody*

[ed. No brainer, right? You don't just leave potential life-threatening bio-warfare components laying around with no oversight. Right?]

***

Amrith Ramkumar (WSJ): Top artificial-intelligence executives are joining security experts in calling for Congress to protect against biological threats posed by AI, adding to growing pressure on lawmakers to address the technology’s risks.

Three major chief executive officers—OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis of Google’s DeepMind AI lab—are among the signatories of a letter urging Congress to require safeguards when companies order synthetic DNA and RNA, a key step in developing certain vaccines and biotech breakthroughs.

… It was organized by two tech-focused think tanks that said the topic is a rare source of agreement among libertarians, progressives, researchers and rival executives.

Dean W. Ball: I am honored to have signed on to this letter. This is an urgent priority for near-term action by Congress. Biotech is advancing rapidly on its own, and I—and many others—believe the “Mythos moment” in AI/bio is coming soon. It is time for action.

revisions to existing nucleic acid screening requirements were mandated by an EO POTUS signed a year ago; I worked on them while in govt. I genuinely don’t know what happened to that work after I left but it is nine months behind schedule. Congress acting is better anyway.

Joshua Teperowski Monrad: People are so astounded when I tell them this isn't already law

Alec Stapp: it really is insane [...]

Other signatories include Patrick Collison, Paul Graham, Mustafa Suleyman, Alexandr Wang and a lot more where that came from.

We need such letters, despite this having ~100% support among those who understand any side of this, this is such a slam dunk that we should be doing this even before considerations of AI making malicious action vastly easier.

Why? Because political awareness is basically still near zero:

Will Poff-Webster: When I was a Senate staffer and occasionally got the chance to bring up biosecurity risks from AI, the response was often, “What? AI might be able to do that?”

This letter shows how easy it’d be for Congress to act on this

Betting on Humans

What to do about AI & jobs.

Now, the great majority of people—whether they are “blue collar” or “white collar” laborers—spend their working hours orchestrating machines of various kinds: some to transform knowledge or bits, and others to transform atoms. Yet just a few decades ago, it would have been impossible to understand what it is that most people today call “work.”

Today, a relatively small group of technologists is starting to see the world through the lens of another fundamental discovery: deep learning, the approach to AI that has enabled machines to think and undergirded substantively all major advancements in AI over the past decade. And like their forebears at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, these technologists are building new machines, uniquely enabled by the insights and abstractions furnished from the new science. Some believe new types of labor will emerge, concentrated on the orchestration of machines, or the tasks that remain best suited to the human touch. Others believe this time is different, and that human labor will soon be permanently obsolete.

We do not pretend to know the definitive answers. What we do know is that much of this future remains to be written, in no small part by the policy choices we make today. And what we hope to offer is a roadmap for how politicians and policymakers might bet on human agency under stark uncertainty.

Futures Not Yet Written

There are two fundamental stories one can tell about the impact of artificial intelligence on human labor. One is the pessimistic version: most of us are like the people in the early Industrial Revolution who could not learn to adapt or were stuck as mere cogs in factories. Very few of us, if any, will learn to orchestrate machines at a higher level of abstraction, and neither will we learn to invent new machines, since the artificial intelligence systems will soon exceed humans in their capacity for invention and discovery. That view is one of historical discontinuity: replacing knowledge work strikes deeper at the human uniqueness that has kept us employed than replacing various kinds of cognitive and manual labor has in the past.

The other story is optimistic: just like those early conductors and inventors of machines, we will continue our long human legacy of finding yet more to occupy our time, yet more activity that other humans find valuable. There is much more of this than we can possibly realize, because our collective imagination is bounded, yet our collective wants are limitless. How barren, in retrospect, do we find the mind of the man who thought the human touch was gone simply because we had invented machines stronger, more durable, and more reliable than us at physical labor?

Both stories will probably be true at the same time, but the unfortunate reality is that nobody knows in what proportion. More unfortunately still, it will be some time until we know: the temporary disruption that would portend broad displacement would look quite similar to the creative destruction that would come with just another industrial revolution. It’s easy for policymakers who first start to grapple with the notion of advanced artificial intelligence to reflexively adopt the pessimistic view: for so long, they’ve heard the idea that AI will be important and the idea that many jobs will be lost in the same breath that coming around on the scope of AI seems to imply believing that human labor is doomed. But that would be premature, and converts must resist becoming zealots.

Here, then, is the first—and in some sense the most troubling—message for policymakers: nobody can know what is going to happen. Anyone speaking with confidence about predictions of this kind is either misunderstanding or misleading. It is not just that we do not know “the future,” in some broad sense. We also do not know the specific nature of any problems posed by AI to the labor market: we do not know what industries, age groups, levels of seniority, job types, and so on will be affected by AI automation in practice rather than in theory or in speculation. We do not know over what timeframe these still-hypothetical changes will occur.

And if AI really does profoundly upend the labor market, we still do not know what the resulting distribution of economic resources will look like. Will the AI labs profit immensely, absorbing huge swathes of economic value as many other institutions struggle to survive? Or will AI models and systems become commodified, with value accruing to the compute designers and manufacturers? Or is it some hybrid, with most firms in the economy seeing higher profits with fewer employees and, for whatever reason, not seeing a need to hire additional people to do anything? Will there be new, high-skilled jobs created that we need to retrain millions of people for? Or will there be no new jobs at all? We do not know, and we cannot know.

That is because we are still in the process of writing this future. The role of humans in future economies is not something we simply discover as it occurs. How we distribute tasks between humans and machines is largely downstream of a web of complicated economic incentives and technical features. Is the marginal unit of computing power better spent on smoothing over the jagged frontier so no role remains for humans, or for even further improving the spikes of AI capability? Does the tax system favor firms who spend the marginal payroll dollar on hiring a worker to oversee the machines or an agent to do the same? Is there a safety net to catch those hit by local disruptions to give them the room to reorient themselves, come back five years later, and fight for their place in a new economy—or do we mollify their drive with ill-placed subsidies long enough for them to grow docile and for the structures around them to calcify? All this is contingent, and when policymakers ask ‘what will happen’, they fail to see that they’re among the central live players in this question.

How should our leaders grapple with this double uncertainty of what they should want and what will happen?

by Anton Leicht and Dean W. Ball, Threading the Needle |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Spoiler alert: Zvi provides a quick (and incomplete) summary (DWAtV):] 

***

"Anton Leicht and Dean Ball team up to write about what we should do about potential job loss due to AI, from the perspective of prospective ‘de facto normal technology’ AI worlds even if they don’t call it that. They wisely say we don’t know what will happen, and that the ‘no regrets’ actions will be insufficient so solve the problem, but expect the world to stay normal enough, and humans competitive and useful enough, that we can use traditional solutions to such problems.

They start with easy wins.

1. Even footing: Equalize tax treatment of AI versus labor. Yes, please.

2. Retraining: Bolster workforce training and development. They notice they are skeptical in practice, and I am even more skeptical, but sure, we can try it.

3. Measurement: Know what is happening. Yes, of course.

Then they recommend what they call difficult bets.

4. Junior Job Subsidy.

Anton Leicht and Dean Ball: We put to you that the solution to deal with junior job losses might be to keep these jobs around by brute force for a while, so that the critically important economic incentive to explore how to use junior workers does not cease.

More specifically, we might do so by restructuring the tax code to subsidize junior employment.

Given who is saying to keep jobs around by brute force, by which they mean tax incentives, we should listen. This seems like a good use of progressive taxation, which we want to do anyway, to stack the deck in favor of hiring more young workers and those switching industries, presumably with phase outs for high earners.

This risks distortions if taken too far (e.g. dumping senior workers for subsidized junior workers, or gaming designations), the marginal value of young workers could easily fall below zero marginal product if there is no future for them, and gating to particular industries or occupations risks going into ‘picking winners and losers’ and other similar dangerous territories and opportunities for corruption and pork. The authors are well aware, and are pushing anyway.

The main solution they offer is, again, taxes. They suggest doing so via raising corporate taxes, despite this having a long track record of being highly economically damaging. You definitely need to avoid worse distortions, and you definitely do not want a ‘token tax’ as such for this reason, although a tax on compute is non-crazy. Taking a stake in frontier developers is definitely an error.

They quickly dismiss consumption taxes as having a fatal perception problem, despite them being objectively the efficient answer, because they raise prices and signaling is too important here. I found this disappointing, and there are ways to fix this and also make the tax progressive.

It would be great if humans remained fundamentally highly productive while we collectively got far wealthier due to AI, so all we needed to do was redistribution and moving the tax code around.

Alas, no, I do not expect we live in such a convenient world. At which point, we likely have bigger problems, but also employment does not get solved with basic tax code shifts. If we stay in control somehow then we could do progressive redistribution to keep food on the table and a roof over people’s heads, but the jobs will vanish, or they will be rather fully fake."

Trump Administration Continues Efforts to Dismantle Consumer Protection Agency

Consumer protection agency deletes thousands of pages as Trump administration seeks to dismantle it (The Guardian)

Last February, Trump appointed Russell Vought, White House budget director, as acting director of the CFPB. Vought was a key architect of Project 2025, which called for the abolition of the agency. He has since ordered CFPB employees to stop all work, dropped dozens of pending enforcement cases and tried to fire most of the agency’s staff, a move blocked by a federal judge in an ongoing lawsuit brought by the agency’s staff union. Recent court filings reveal agency leadership aims to reduce the agency’s headcount from 1,174 to 556. [...]

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to enforce federal consumer financial law, promote fair competition, protect people from deceptive or predatory financial products and compel companies to engage with consumers when they file complaints.

Since its inception, the bureau has returned more than $21bn to consumers through monetary compensation and canceled debts. A Democratic Senate banking committee report released this year found the Trump administration’s gutting of the bureau and moves to rescind industry regulations have already cost consumers billions in the past year.

by Amy Qin and Flávio Pessoa, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Guardian Design/Getty Images
[ed. ... and the hits keep coming. See below. Until his supporters say enough is enough, we and they will continue to get screwed. The most relevant question now is if recovery will ever be possible again. Always easier to destroy than to create (or restore). See also: Why are US consumers so angry? It’s not just high prices (Guardian).]

Ocean Observatory Will Go Dark Under Trump Funding Cuts

A portion of one of the most ambitious ocean monitoring networks ever built will go dark this month when scientists board a research vessel and motor off the Oregon coast to pull a research buoy from deep out of the Pacific.

The buoy 80 meters (260 feet) below the water’s surface will be removed June 16 from the Ocean Observatories Initiative — a network of more than 900 ocean sensors built at a cost of $386 million that has continuously collected real-time data for more than a decade. But last month, the National Science Foundation announced it would dismantle most of the system, pulling instruments from waters off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina and Greenland by 2027.

Funded by the foundation, the observatories have tracked everything from ocean circulation and marine ecosystems to climate change and extreme weather. Its data has been freely available and has informed more than 500 scientific publications. The project was slated to run for another 15 to 20 years.

In an emailed statement, the foundation said the decision is not a cancellation, but a “descoping” aligned with a “wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio.” The foundation added that its decision drew in part on a 2025 National Academies report on the future of ocean science. [ed. There has to be some kind of annual award for worst word salad example. This would certainly qualify.]

But for the scientists who built and operated the system — and the researchers, educators and students who rely on its data — the timing feels particularly punishing.

An El Nino event, which disrupts weather patterns and supercharges marine heat waves, is predicted to arrive along the Pacific coast this summer. One marine heat wave is already pushing unusually warm water off California.

Without the Oregon and Washington moorings and the network of underwater gliders the Ocean Observatories Initiative operated in the region, researchers say they’ll lose much of their ability to measure what’s happening below the surface, which is precisely where the most significant oceanographic signals are.

“It’s a crippling loss of information,” Ed Dever, a professor at Oregon State University who helped lead the initiative’s Pacific Northwest operations, told The Associated Press Tuesday. Scientists can get some data from the surface, such as temperature and the distribution of chlorophyll, which drives photosynthesis in plants, but information below cannot be gathered from satellites alone, including low oxygen zones. [...]

The initiative operated on roughly $48 million a year, not including the cost of research vessels, which adds substantially to the overall price. Prior to budget cuts, which began in 2025, around 60 to 70 people worked directly on the project across its partner institutions, Dever said.

“What’s happening with the Ocean Observatories Initiative is not unique,” he said. “This is just one of a number of science facilities that is being dismantled at the present time. It seems to really mark the end of a federal commitment to basic scientific research — a commitment that has served this nation very well for the last 70 years.”

by Annika Hammerschlag, AP |  Read more:
Image: Darlene Trew Crist/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution via AP

[ed. See also: How the 19th-Century Know Nothing Party Reshaped American Politics (Smithsonian):]

***

Like Fight Club, there were rules about joining the secret society known as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner (OSSB). An initiation rite called “Seeing Sam.” The memorization of passwords and hand signs. A solemn pledge never to betray the order. A pureblooded pedigree of Protestant Anglo-Saxon stock and the rejection of all Catholics. And above all, members of the secret society weren’t allowed to talk about the secret society. If asked anything by outsiders, they would respond with, “I know nothing.”

So went the rules of this secret fraternity that rose to prominence in 1853 and transformed into the powerful political party known as the Know Nothings. At its height in the 1850s, the Know Nothing party, originally called the American Party, included more than 100 elected congressmen, eight governors, a controlling share of half-a-dozen state legislatures from Massachusetts to California, and thousands of local politicians. Party members supported deportation of foreign beggars and criminals; a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants; mandatory Bible reading in schools; and the elimination of all Catholics from public office. They wanted to restore their vision of what America should look like with temperance, Protestantism, self-reliance, with American nationality and work ethic enshrined as the nation's highest values.

AI: Artificial Immigrants

Missing the forest for the trees

Advanced AI is basically the embodiment of immigration as envisioned in the conservative nightmare:

1. We are letting a bunch of new agents into our society 

2. They don’t clearly share our values and we suspect a society full of them would be awful by our lights 

3. But we expect them to provide very cheap labor

4. Which will undercut local wages and leave locals unemployed

5. They will probably gain power and influence over time—in the economy, politics and culture—and end up controlling everything, sidelining and outcompeting the original population, including those who initially benefited from cheap labor 

6. (Meanwhile, half the local population may become friends with them and try to hand them all this on a platter) 

Whether or not you think this is a good description of the situation with foreign humans joining your country, it is a good description of the likely AI to come, and it’s even worse than imagined:

• their values are potentially radically alien where foreigners presumably share much by virtue of being human, and AI ‘lives’ are probably worthless if they probably aren’t conscious

• their ability to work more cheaply than locals is unprecedented. They are also likely to be much more competent

• The scale of the influx will be breathtaking

by Katja Grace, Meteuphoric (WSSP) |  Read more:

The Way We Treat Pigs is a Sin

I consider myself a pretty good and decent guy, overall. I don’t commit crimes. I’m nice to the people I meet. I help out my friends. I take good care of my pet rabbit, and I donate lots of money to other people who take care of abandoned and sick rabbits. My politics might not always be correct or wise, but I want things like the end of poverty, the end of war, and so on.

And yet just down the highway from me, there are facilities for the mass torture of animals. In the United States, there are 73 million pigs in “concentrated animal feeding operations”, more commonly known as factory farms:

There are many horrors experienced by chickens and other animals on factory farms, but the way pigs are forced to live is probably the worst. For most of their lives, female pigs (sows) are kept in tiny cages — either “gestation crates” when they’re pregnant, or “farrowing crates” when they’re nursing. A sow will spend most of her life in one of these cages.

In a gestation crate or a farrowing crate, sows don’t have enough room to turn around — all they can do is either stand or lie down in a pile of their own feces. Imagine living your entire life in an airline seat, where you couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom or take your seatbelt off. That’s how these pigs live.

Pigs are social creatures — they exhibit “emotional contagion”, meaning that when one pig is scared or happy, other pigs start to feel the same, and they give comfort and support to other pigs who are in distress. Research suggests that they’re at least as smart as dogs, and probably smarter. But a pig in one of these crates will never get any social interaction in her entire adult life — she can’t even turn around to look at her babies.

This is torture. The pigs who are confined this way bite the bars of their cages, desperate for a freedom that will never come. They have their tails chopped off as babies (generally without anesthetic), so that they can’t chew each other’s tails in anguish. But no relief ever comes — they live out their entire lives and die in these tiny torture-cages.

I have no other word for this except “sin”. This is a sin. If there is a God, and if that God is in any way good and moral, then that God is looking down with disgust on the way my society treats pigs. I go about my daily life — hanging out with my friends, petting my rabbit, going out to eat at nice restaurants — never thinking about the horrible suffering that has engulfed the entire lives of those tens of millions of pigs. [...]

On top of the obvious and demonstrated inability of individual action to solve this problem, it’s insufficient even from a moral stance. Suppose that our society farmed human beings for food. Would simply refusing to eat human flesh be enough to absolve me of culpability? I don’t think so. I would still have a responsibility to try to abolish the evil system.

In fact, “abolish the evil system” is exactly what voters in California and some other states are trying to do. In 2018, by an almost 2-to-1 margin, California voters enacted a law called Proposition 12 that heavily restricted the sale of meat from pigs, hens, and calves that weren’t raised with a minimum amount of space. Crucially, the partial prohibition extended to meat from animals raised inhumanely in other states. This followed on the heels of a similar law in Massachusetts two years earlier.

Courts have upheld the law, but Republicans in Congress are trying to undo it from the federal level. In 2025 they proposed the Save Our Bacon Act, which would ban states from enacting animal welfare laws like the ones voters approved in California and Massachusetts. The Save Our Bacon Act failed on its own, but this year it got incorporated into the Farm Bill, which has passed the House and is now being considered in the Senate:

Companies and industry groups have also worked with members of Congress for over a decade to introduce federal legislation to nullify laws like those in California and Massachusetts. The latest iteration is called the Save Our Bacon Act, originally proposed last year…This effort, which for years went nowhere as standalone legislation in Congress, now has a decent chance at becoming law as part of the new Farm Bill…

In late April, the House of Representatives passed its version of the Farm Bill, which included the language from the Save Our Bacon Act…It’s “really a Save Our Crate Act,” Brent Hershey, a hog farmer who opposes it, told me. “A vote for the farm bill,” he said, “is a vote to cage an animal that can’t walk or turn around.”

Lewis Bollard has a good post explaining what’s at stake. In fact, the current Farm Bill wouldn’t just reverse the recent anti-crate laws in California and Massachusetts — it would roll back much of the progress that has been made in farm animal welfare over the decade, as well as preventing any future welfare laws along similar lines:

The [Save Our Bacon] Act would stop any state or locality from regulating the sale of meat based on how it’s produced in another state. This would likely invalidate state and local bans on foie gras, crated veal, and more…It would also halt future legislative progress. Congress hasn’t passed a farm animal welfare law in decades. State laws are where reforms actually happen. The SOB Act would gut them by mandating they contain a giant loophole for out-of-state imports.

Why should Congress prevent the voters of California and Massachusetts from taking a stand against the evils of factory farming? First and foremost, it’s a case of a concentrated interest group — the pig farming lobby — making headway against a diffuse interest (voters with a conscience). In fact, if you believe the polls, a majority of the country — even a majority of those who regularly eat pork — would probably support measures like the ones in California and Massachusetts: [...]

In fact, I suspect that the American public is still in a mood to support animal welfare laws like this. The Save Our Bacon Act failed on its own, and its supporters had to end up sneakily burying it within the much bigger Farm Bill; to me, this suggests that even the SOB Act’s proponents knew how bad it would make them look if people started paying attention.

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Image: Humane Society via Wikimedia Commons; Our World in Data; YouTube

[ed. Is anyone surprised this continues? Everything Congress does (or doesn't do) is purely transactional. The Congress/lobbyist/fundraising/election process/system is a contagion on our society (... and pigs). See also: Leadershit.]

How to Defeat an Autocrat: Lessons From Hungary

Starting early in the morning on the second Saturday of May, first hundreds and then thousands of people gathered in the square in front of Hungary’s majestic Parliament building to celebrate the start of a new political era. This was the square where tens of thousands gathered in 1956 and 1989 to demand an end to the Soviet occupation and in 2006 to protest a discredited government. It was the square on which Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s regime imposed a major redesign more than a decade ago — with traffic rerouted away, a large reflecting pool and raised beds installed, narrow pathways laid down — apparently to ensure that no such mass gathering could take place again. Today it was the square where Peter Magyar, a former Orban loyalist, would be sworn in, promising a rebirth of democracy and liberty after 16 years of autocratic control.

Squeezing into the available spaces and gradually filling up nearby cafes and streets, the crowd absorbed people of all ages: young people who didn’t remember a time before Orban and who had voted in unprecedented numbers; aging intellectuals who didn’t think they’d ever celebrate their country again; multigenerational families who had arrived by bus after seeing Magyar in their hometowns and villages. During his campaign, Magyar had traveled to an estimated 700 locations, turning many of them into “Tisza islands” — outposts of support for his party. By the end, Magyar was holding five or more rallies a day.

It had looked like an impossible quest. Orban and his cronies dominated the media, persecuted and smeared opposition politicians and changed election laws to benefit his party, Fidesz. Orban had seemed to achieve what the Hungarian sociologist and political theorist Balint Magyar (no relation) calls “autocratic breakthrough” — the point after which it’s impossible to unseat an autocrat using elections. Illiberal politicians from other countries made pilgrimages to Hungary to learn from Orban; CPAC, the gathering for American national conservatives, started staging an annual convention there; and Vice President JD Vance visited Budapest in advance of the election, in a show of support for Orban. And yet Hungarians handed Tisza not just a victory but a constitutional majority, enough power to reverse Orban’s changes to Hungarian laws and institutions. The triumph was stunning — unique in our era of democratic backsliding — and it holds clear lessons for the United States. [...]

In his inaugural speech to Parliament, broadcast on giant screens set up around the square, Peter Magyar said that voters had handed him a mandate “not just to change the government, but to change the system. To start over.”

Magyar enumerated the ways in which Orban had damaged Hungary: a stalled economy in which a third of the population lives in poverty, inadequate health care, low-quality schools, child welfare institutions plagued by abuse, an atmosphere of hatred and fear. Orban’s regime had “stolen from the common good of the Hungarian nation — from the pockets of the Hungarian people, and from the tables of Hungarian children and the elderly,” Magyar said, “an estimated 20 trillion Hungarian forints,” or some $65 billion, over the last decade and a half.

Previous opposition politicians had described Orban’s regime as “corrupt,” a relatively mild term suggesting some aberration from the government’s intended function. Peter Magyar made no such accommodation. Borrowing a term coined by Balint Magyar, he has called it a mafia state — a fundamentally criminal enterprise. Third lesson: Don’t mince words. [...]

For all his tireless work over the last two years, Magyar did not create his political machine from scratch. Like Zohran Mamdani, Magyar excelled at converting potential supporters into campaign volunteers. An existing news distribution service provided an initial skeleton of the organizing network. A panoply of grass-roots protest movements joined, too. On the day of Magyar’s inauguration, a parallel, smaller commemoration organized by the city of Budapest celebrated those organizations. One by one, people took the microphone to give a short speech about their cause and their part in the electoral victory: teachers who had organized against a unified state-dictated curriculum; a young man who spoke up against abuses in the child care system; a high school student persecuted for reciting an anti-Orban poem; organizers of Budapest’s L.G.B.T.Q. Pride celebration. The speakers stayed onstage, gradually forming a crowd of the kind — the many kinds — of ordinary Hungarians who had ended the Orban era.

That’s a fifth lesson: Grass-roots organizations that have little or no connection to electoral politics — in the United States, that might be the networks formed by the No Kings rallies, ICE-resistance groups and so on — can matter as much as or more than those already focused on winning votes.

Another lesson lies in the issues that motivated Magyar’s voters. Hungary’s economy is a mess, but post-election polling by Median, an organization that had predicted election results with uncanny accuracy, shows that voters saw corruption as the most important issue by far. Asked why they thought Orban had lost, 49 percent cited corruption, and only 18 percent thought it was the “worsening economic situation, rising cost of living.” The next three reasons cited were “lies” (15 percent); “fearmongering, war rhetoric” (11 percent); and “people got fed up” (10 percent). In other words, Hungarians seemed to see the damage that Orbanism had done to the nation as more important than any harm they felt they had suffered as individuals. They were united by a sense of moral outrage — “value choices,” as one person close to the incoming government described it to me. [...]

Peter Magyar scheduled his inauguration for Europe Day — the 76th anniversary of the declaration that created the road map for a united continent. Before he was sworn in, the European flag was raised again. But the Szekely flag remained, signaling that Magyar seeks to represent all Hungarian citizens, including those who supported Orban. In some U.S. coverage, Magyar has been labeled centrist or right-of-center. What his politics actually are — and this is another lesson of his victory — is pluralist. [...]

Like many other autocrats and aspiring autocrats — Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump — Orban had been apparently desperate to maintain power because if he lost his office, he could face criminal charges. For this reason, even as Peter Magyar surged in the polls, and even on Election Day, as early returns pointed to Tisza’s overwhelming victory, many Hungarians assumed Orban would find a way to cling to power. Would he refuse to acknowledge election results? Would he declare martial law? But even after he authorized lump-sum payments of six months’ salary to members of the uniformed services, military personnel were said to overwhelmingly favor regime change. Orban must have known he could not count on them.

He stepped down from Parliament after the election, and on inauguration day he wasn’t in the building. Neither were several of the most prominent members of Fidesz, the party he still leads, which won roughly a fourth of the seats in the legislature. President Tamas Sulyok, an Orban loyalist, was there, however. Before Magyar took his oath of office, Sulyok delivered an anodyne speech about the importance of rule of law and constitutional order.

Magyar refused to play along. “It is ironic to hear him speak of the rule of law now, after two years of silence,” he said. “Mr. President, you remained silent when the failed prime minister called half the country” — those who opposed him — “‘insects to be exterminated.’ You expressed no concern when the secret services were sent after the largest opposition party. You failed to speak up when billions in public funds were used to spread war hatred among Hungarians, including among our children. After so much cowardice and turning a blind eye, how could you represent the unity of this nation? You cannot. It is time to leave with your head held high while you still have the chance.”

Hungarians think of themselves as a polite and reserved people. They arrive on time. They observe decorum. They refrain from confrontation. On election night, however, they had shocked themselves by dancing in the streets, chanting “It’s over!” And now their new prime minister was shocking them again. Inside Parliament there was silence, but the thousands of people watching the speech on the outdoor screens broke out in screams and applause. And when the camera cut to Sulyok, his face frozen in an uncomfortable half-smile, the crowd let out a round of boos that could probably be heard on the other side of the Danube. [...]

When Magyar emerged from the building to address the assembled crowd, he offered his own lesson of his impossible victory. “Against a machine of power,” he said, “we don’t need another machine of power, but real people who — going from mailbox to mailbox, house to house, in the cold, the frost and the rain — are capable of anything for their homeland, their neighbors, their relatives and their community.”

The next task was “to rediscover how to see ourselves as a community once again,” he said. “Therefore, I ask you to turn toward those compatriots who are disappointed today, who are afraid, or who experience this period as a loss. Do not try to defeat them; do not look down on them. Listen to them and talk to them. Tell them that this country belongs to them, too; that they are needed, just as everyone is needed; and that together, we will rebuild Hungary, because there is no left, there is no right — only Hungarians.”

One of the secrets of Peter Magyar’s success, Balint Magyar had told me, lay in reclaiming the symbols of the nation: the flag, the national anthem, the very idea of Hungarian-ness. Now Peter Magyar was watching over an elaborate national performance: the raising of the flag, soldiers goose-stepping, cavalry in ornate uniforms.

And then the pageantry was over, but Magyar was still separated from the crowd by large expanses of empty space, the distance that Orban’s government had so carefully engineered. Magyar started motioning to the crowd: Come closer, come closer — but people were already pressed up against the edge of the reflecting pool. After a few moments, the excitement and the desire to be fully a part of this historic moment became too much to resist. Some men hiked up their pants and ran across the reflecting pool — which, it turned out, was just a couple of inches deep. Almost immediately, hundreds more followed. They ran splashing through the water and onto the other side, filling the space from which they had so long been excluded. “This is your house now!” Magyar exclaimed.

by M. Gessen, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Máté Bartha

[ed. So happy for them. It must feel wonderful to have hope again when change seemed impossible.]

Hug of Death

Will Japan's content industries survive the government's efforts to promote them?

You can be loved or you can be feared.

In a January interview, the White House’s chief of staff declared that we live in a world “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” signaling America’s choice to take the latter path.

Japan, on the other hand, seems dedicated to the former. In February, Japanese government officials announced a plan to expand the size of the nation’s content production industry, meaning its books, manga, anime, games, movies, and more, to $130 billion USD by 2033, with an eye towards making pop culture a pillar of the economy.

Is this a realistic goal? That’s another story, one I tackled last month. But let’s put the punditry aside and say they succeed – that the Japanese government manages to create the world’s first true fantasy-industrial complex, a government and private industry working together to harness content production and export as an economic engine. (What about Korea, you might ask? They are a pop-cultural powerhouse, but the nation’s fortunes still rest upon the physical products it produces — content currently only accounts for 2% of their economy.) The question then becomes: what are the broader implications of linking a nation’s economic well-being to its entertainment industry? In other words, what happens when a country doesn’t simply promote its pop culture but comes to depend on it?

I’ve written for years about how Japan’s network of cultural producers has won hearts and minds around the globe – how their efforts have contributed to Japan’s considerable soft power. But that was an organic development, entirely grass roots, the product of countless creators and consumers collaborating over many years to build one of the most vibrant environments for pop culture on the planet. The government is well aware of its nation’s reputation as a pop superpower, but it played little role in making it so.

What about the Cool Japan fund? Notoriously ineffective. Critics (who include the fund’s own CEO) frame this as a bad thing. But I think otherwise. The scandals, the questionable investments (Cars? Refrigerators!?), and general ineptitude are a blessing in disguise. I say this with no schadenfreude. The Cool Japan bureaucrats I’ve met all seem like good folks. I say it because a government getting involved in the production of fantasies has huge implications for societies. And to be frank, I don’t think any of the architects behind Japan’s big push have really thought them through. [...]

Freedom of expression is a good thing, most of us will agree. But free speech is where the problems will begin, and compound, for the Japanese government. If the authorities are really going to take an active stand in promoting everything, without interfering in those creative works, they’re going to find themselves associated with things that get, well, creative with social norms. More than that, things that anger and disgust.

The dark matter of Japan’s pop-cultural industry is huge amounts of edgy content. Some of it is quite disturbing. (Don’t worry, that isn’t a risky click: it’s a link to the time I got “lolicon” into The New Yorker.) I’m not a fan of this material, but I’ve always believed the freedom Japanese artists feel to go places that polite society doesn’t, is part of what gives the content industry such vitality here. I mean, even if you aren’t producing crazy stuff, the knowledge that nothing’s off limits has to unshackle imaginations. Or shackle them. I don’t judge.

Anyway, promoting the industry as a whole doesn’t equal endorsement of any given content, right? The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers, blah blah blah, right? Right. But also wrong. Because once you’ve made Content with a capital C the foundation of your nation’s economy, it becomes your official face to the world. That includes all of the skeevy stuff that freaks people out, in Japan and elsewhere. And the implications of that are downright existential, as in “can a nation really exist on pop culture alone?”

by Matt Alt, Pure Invention |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Guardrails (What Guardrails?)

It is the most overused metaphor of Trump 2.0 (along, perhaps, with “Trump 2.0”). If you are worried that this administration has careened out of control — gutting the federal work force, threatening allies, starting wars, militarizing American cities, emasculating NATO, knocking down chunks of the White House, proposing that taxpayers foot the bill for a $1.8 billion political slush fund — then the failure of “guardrails” is your constant lament.

“Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Kamala Harris warned late in her failed 2024 campaign. The guardrails are “made of Jell-O,” a host for MSNOW complained as he considered Trump’s first year back in office. And Democrats pitch all manner of legislation as essential “guardrails” around the powers and the personality of the 47th president.

What “norms” were to Trump’s first term, “guardrails” are to his second. We’ve gone from “Can he do that?” to “What can stop him?”

The problem is that guardrails — their presence or absence, their strength or deterioration — are a limiting way to imagine restraints on executive power. Even as they supposedly protect us from the overreach of our leaders, guardrails risk reducing the rest of us to spectators. A guardrail suggests that some trustworthy sage of long ago (James Madison is a favorite) has inspected the road and erected sensible boundaries. No need to worry; there’s a guardrail.

Except sometimes there isn’t; or sometimes it’s weak. Or sometimes the only way to make a guardrail go from metaphor to reality is to become one yourself. [...]

The ultimate paper guardrail in the United States is the Constitution, our owner’s manual. This one really is paper; you can visit the National Archives in Washington and see those four brittle and handwritten pages in a hermetically sealed case pumped with argon gas. (Yes, it’s a guardrail with its own guardrails.)

We know the main constitutional guardrails: powers split among the three branches of the federal government; the guardrails of federalism, that is, of powers shared between the states and the national government; and the Bill of Rights, which basically became a condition for skeptical state conventions to ratify the whole thing.

The verbs of the Constitution’s preamble burst with self-assurance — establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, secure the blessings of liberty — but different passages cut in unexpected directions. For example, the stipulation in Article I, Section IV, that the “times, places and manner” of elections “shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof” is a vital democratic guardrail when, say, an American president who has just lost re-election pressures state officials to “find” more votes in his favor. But how protective of democracy is this guardrail when those state legislatures gleefully redraw congressional districts so that politicians choose their voters and not the other way around?

Even the Constitution’s principal author was not sure that the document was adequate to the task before it. In Federalist 48, Madison wondered whether these mere “parchment barriers” were strong enough to sustain the Republic in the face of “the encroaching spirit of power.”

This singular piece of parchment has endured for more than two centuries and has come to be regarded as the sacred text of our civic religion. Tom Paine even referred to the Constitution as America’s “political bible,” and its most famous passages are often recited aloud, with devotional reverence. [...]

There has been a standoff in recent decades over proper constitutional interpretation. On one side stands originalism (and its ne’er-do-well cousin, textualism); on the other is an evolving, so-called living Constitution. I’m partial neither to an originalist interpretation, with its overtly ideological intentions, nor to a living Constitution, with its almost vibes-based jurisprudence. More attractive is the notion of a “working” Constitution, as Jack Rakove put it in “Original Meanings,” his 1996 history of the Constitution’s beginnings.

Rakove wrote that “Americans have always possessed two Constitutions, not one: the formal document adopted in 1787-88, with its amendments; and the working Constitution comprising the body of precedents, habits, understandings and attitudes that shape how the federal system operates at any historical moment.”

This does not necessarily mean that the Constitution is becoming a wiser version of itself every day, but simply that the document becomes real when it encounters the world it means to govern. In Federalist 37, Madison seems to agree: “All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications.”

The law is obscure and equivocal until it is put in action, which means that our paper guardrails aren’t real until they are tested. You don’t really know how strong the railing is until something smashes against it.

In their 2018 book, “How Democracies Die,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt emphasize two political ideas — two guardrails — that are crucial to sustaining democracy: institutional forbearance and mutual toleration.

Politicians display institutional forbearance when they exercise restraint in the use of even their legitimate powers, not deploying them in full for temporary advantage, if only because someday a rival will come into power and do likewise. And mutual toleration means that politicians consider their opponents legitimate participants in the public arena, not existential enemies who must be vanquished at all costs.

When Levitsky and Ziblatt published the book, both guardrails were already under stress in American politics. Today, they’ve been overrun.

Mutual toleration has nearly vanished — politicians and supporters from one side see their opponents on the other as evil, as destroyers of all they hold dear. “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump said on Jan. 6, 2021, while Democrats invariably describe Trump as an “existential threat” to American democracy. Absent mutual toleration, the stakes are always at the highest pitch: National survival requires partisan victory.

Institutional forbearance has also deteriorated beyond recognition. The Department of Justice investigates and indicts a president’s political enemies and insulates the president and his family and businesses from tax inquiries. Immigration enforcement agents descend upon neighborhoods, workplaces and schools, detaining, raiding and even killing in the name of mass deportation. A self-styled Department of Government Efficiency takes a chain saw to the federal work force, eviscerating U.S. foreign assistance along the way. And a president is granted, via a generous Supreme Court, presumptive immunity for whatever “official acts” he commits on the job.

After all, why exercise forbearance when you finally wield the power to do what you’ve always wanted to do? When they get in the way of pet projects and partisan interests, high-minded ideas are easily disregarded by those in power. Consider Vice President JD Vance’s dismissiveness toward the American creed — he argues that people will fight for a place and a home, not for mere “abstractions” — even though the oath of office he swore was to defend the Constitution itself, that piece of paper so packed with abstractions.

The individuals who serve as democratic guardrails are those who uphold oaths, who challenge us to live up to our parchment barriers, who give all those other guardrails flesh.

One such flesh-and-blood American guardrail died recently, a man whose lengthy record in public life was unfairly downgraded during his final years. His name was Robert Swan Mueller III, and his case is illustrative of how we’ve come to regard constraints on presidential behavior, and on those tasked with investigating it.

by Carlos Lozada, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images